HHhH: A Novel Paperback – July 23, 2013

The most important step to enjoying "HHhH," the fantastic debut novel by Laurent Binet, is the same as the most important step for enjoying a plane ride, a scuba dive, or a bondage S&M session: you must trust your partner. "HHhH" is the story of Laurent Binet trying to tell a story of two World War II assassins on a mission to kill a devious Nazi. It's the story of the rise of that devious Nazi (Reinhard Heydrich), the fall of Czechoslovakia, and the birth of the Final Solution. It's a trip through Binet's mind, with all the back alleyways of an old Prague neighborhood and enough asides to tire a reluctant Dutch prince. At once a treatise on historical fiction, a postmodern meditation on the role of an author, and a gripping suspense yarn with one of the simplest of plots (two guys try to kill another dude), "HHhH" is a book you need to pick up and read, like, right now.In the first few pages Binet admits he doesn't want to condemn our brave assassins to the world of the "vulgar character." But what, Binet asks, is he supposed to do? Should he "...drag this vision around with me all my life without having tried, at least to give it some substance." Throughout the story, Binet grapples with how to best tell this story. Truth be told, I have always been turned off by the hijinks and trickery of meta-fiction. The sort of safety net it provides - I'm playing a joke on the reader but if it doesn't work, perhaps that's part of the joke - is what irritates me, but the fact that Binet comes out and says that he is not embracing meta fiction as much as he is beaten down by it, that this story is as much his as it is his characters - that type of sincerity is rare and invigorating. Yes, Binet will interject himself into the story. In the end, this is a story of a man trying to figure out how to tell a fantastic story without obscuring it with the haze of fiction. You have to trust his vision and just enjoy the ride.The story begins with the author's first awareness of the plot, charts the rise of Reinhard Heydrich to the top of the insidious SS, and maps out the evolution of the Final Solution - and how much of the Nazis' most monstrous plots seemed to have Heydrich at the center of them. In the beginning, Binet will show his research and erudition, documenting everything known about the beginnings of Heydrich and our two assassins. He will recount anecdotes, discuss the training of the assassins, and where each of the players were at different turns of WWII history. At turns hilarious, informative, and gripping, "HHhH" was really tough for me to put down. One highlight from the author's research for me was a previously unknown story regarding Heydrich's hobby as Luftwaffe pilot, and another with the Ukranian national soccer team.Some of the criticisms of "HHhH" state that Binet masquerades as a non-fiction book that will from time to time slide back into fictional creation - inventing a scene at Auschwitz, discussing Himmler's reaction to a certain event that he has no historical basis for (then, in a fit of postmodernism, wavers on whether to include said reaction), or how Heydrich feels about Albert Speer - but I believe these criticisms are off base. This is a story of Binet deciding how to tell a story, and though he does invent occasionally throughout the pages it is not a deal breaker for me. However, I was slightly surprised that in parts of this book Binet seems to lambast Jonathan Littell, author of "The Kindly Ones." Binet does not love TKO like I did (as unpublished parts of the manuscript which appeared on The Millions certainly prove), and doesn't believe in the fictional creation of characters in a historical setting. That's what Binet can't handle - he knows that Littell has invented some, and thus he doesn't know what to believe and what not to believe. This has struck some readers as hypocritical, as Binet has done the same thing on a smaller scale - he is still a novelist after all, not a documentarian. Binet says that "creating characters to understand historical fact is like fabricating evidence." Of course, this is where Binet is off base, as Littell is not only trying to understand historical fact but also tell a story of Greek justice, the guilt of a murderous state, and the voice of genocidal perpetrator.But I am getting off track. As I have said throughout, Binet has written a masterful novel. He has attempted to tell the story of real people, real fighters, real monsters, real murder, real massacres, and to do that he turned them into fiction. "Unfair," Binet writes, "but there you go." And in converting them to fiction, he produced an amazing addition for any literary bookshelf.

I feel a certain kinship with--and antipathy for--Laurent Binet.Having spent the last six years researching and writing Resistance, my own take on the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich--after spending the decade before that plotting my approach to the project--I can understand his obsession with the subject. It's a relatively unknown story--not part of the collective consciousness, at least--but it feels, to us at least, like something everyone should learn about in school. One of the most evil men in European history, assassinated by parachutists on a secret mission--who wouldn't want to know about that? So we've apparently both studied it with a fervor worthy of Sean Connery's character in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." It's a hallowed obsession, this thirst for the truth about a historical moment so pure and pristine that it becomes our own personal Holy Grail.There's a chapter early on where he discusses the time he spends studying the assassination, the years where, as he puts it, "this story keeps growing inside me." "I learn loads of things, some with only a distant connection to Heydrich, but I tell myself that everything can be useful, that I must immerse myself in a period to understand its spirit--and the thread of knowledge, once you pull at it, continues unraveling on its own," Binet writes, and I could have just as easily written the same words myself. (Like Binet, I became an information sponge for all things related to my topic--filling bookshelves with dusty out-of-print volumes, scribbling in dozens of notebooks, tramping down side streets in parts of Prague where few foreigners visit, or travelling by train and bus to the corners of the Czech Republic.) "The vastness of the information I amass ends up frightening me." And then: "I get the feeling that my thirst for documentation, healthy to begin with, is becoming a little bit dangerous--a pretext, basically, for putting off the moment when I have to start writing."Historical fiction is a dicey proposition--every writer, and every reader, has their own personal comfort level of how much history they want to mix with how much fiction, and those comfort levels may not line up for a given combination of author and reader and topic. And Binet's book is as much about finding that mix--about the ethics of weaving real people into made-up scenes--as it is about the events themselves. Thus it ends up alternately engrossing and aggravating, impossible to put down, but also impossible to accept at face value--or at least without at least a further level of discussion and qualification and qualm. Is Binet asking that historical fiction be held to the same standards as history? That seems a pedantic proposition, one with which I could never agree. I was a history major as an undergraduate, and history is a high-maintenance woman--you have to keep paying attention, all the time; you have to get everything right. The slightest error--a missed clue, a wrong interpretation of a slender sentence--and you unexpectedly become an also-ran, an object of ridicule and scorn. Whereas historical fiction is--or should be--somewhat less demanding, fatter and more generous, comfortable in its own skin, loving and available. Is that fair to the dead who populate its pages? They were real people; they lived and breathed and struggled and died, often for very noble causes, often in ways that the living could never live up to. Is it right for an author to bend their stories to shape his or her purposes? To be honest, I don't really care--or I care, but not nearly as much as Binet does. Why not? Because historical fiction is fun, and necessary.T.E. Lawrence's family reportedly wasn't happy with "Lawrence of Arabia," a movie that portrayed their loved one, at times, as a glory-seeking egomaniac. And while there are moments in the movie that are clearly drawn directly from Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," there are other major plot points that directly contradict that book. In the movie, Lawrence leads a ragtag collection of Bedouin warriors directly through the Nefud Desert to attack a key objective, ignoring the naysayers who tell him the Nefud cannot be crossed; partly through this superhuman feat, he becomes a larger-than-life figure, looked up to and admired by all. Whereas in the book, he leads his men around the Nefud, because--as he describes it--the Nefud cannot be crossed! When I first read this, I was angry at the movie for deceiving me on such a major point--but I learned to forgive it, because it was (and is) one of my favorite films, one of those movies that (as Roger Ebert said when defining his classics) one simply can't bear the thought of not watching again. "Lawrence of Arabia" may have been as much about David Lean and Robert Bolt as it was about T.E. Lawrence, but it connected with me and stuck with me in a way that a stricter biopic never would have. (That's not to say anything goes; an author should know what the people behind his major characters were about, what made them tick, what they sought and what they avoided. It would be unconscionable, to, say, write a World War II story and make Heydrich or Hitler the good guy.) Still, we HAVE TO take the statues off their pedestals and breathe life into them in order to connect with them emotionally, to look into their face and see a bit of ourselves. We have to distort the past in order to save it.And Binet gets that, to some extent--more than his critics would admit, at least; in a sense, this book is about starting out with the strictures of history and relaxing into fiction, and Binet's periodic self-flagellation on the topic gradually gives way to enjoyment and ease. (A quick aside: I can relate to the historical hand-wringing--one of the assassins' first names is variously spelled Jozef or Josef in different historical sources, and I lost a little sleep about which one to use.)Along the way, Binet takes the time to make some interesting observations. In one of my favorite sections, he puts up a bit of ham-handed expository dialogue between one of the future assassins and his fellow soldiers. The dialogue really doesn't seem realistic, and in Binet's next chapter, he admits he made the whole scene up--but then he presents an additional bit of awful expository dialogue and reveals that this bit was directly quoted from the participants' recollections. Is it better dialogue, given its greater reliability? Should it serve the reader or the historian?To his great credit, Binet explores these questions while keeping the narrative brisk; it is a page-turner (or screen-presser, I suppose I should say, since I read it on a Kindle). And by the end of the book, he's writing the scenes he hadn't given himself permission to write; it's like he's siding with freedom over tyranny both in the symbolic sense and in his own approach to the story.But that's my main problem with the book. Binet says he's writing to try and convince his characters that their bravery was worthwhile, that their victory was worth its tremendous human cost--but what right does he have to say that, from the comfort and safety of 70 years on? What right does he have, when the limited historical record suggests they were wracked with guilt over the reprisals that happened after their assassination? (The history of this story is admittedly difficult; enough of the participants died in its aftermath that there's little record of exactly what they said or did at key junctions. Binet admits that: "My story has as many holes in it as a novel," he writes. "But in an ordinary novel, it is the novelist who decides where these holes should occur. Because I am a slave to my scruples, I'm incapable of making that decision." Yet he doesn't admit to making the greatest artistic decision the historian makes--the only artistic decision every historian, no matter how scrupulous, must make--when to start and stop the story, and whom to focus on.) It's easy to second-guess characters and come down on the right side of things when writing historical fiction; it's easy to look at the funeral of a leading Nazi and the sufferings of his assassins and decide we'd rather side with them. There are no consequences to the decision, other than getting to bathe in their reflected glory. We don't have to worry about friends and family being shot, we don't have to wonder if the greatest and most momentous thing we ever did was a mistake. The more distance between an author and his historical subjects, the easier it is to praise their courage--and the less it means. Heroism and writing about heroism are two entirely separate things; writing about bravery isn't necessarily brave.